The Media’s coverage of online abuse of men vs women

Recently, I heard that masculists such as Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and Randi Harper were invited to a panel about abuse hosted by Google Ideas, which is “supposedly” a think tank for promoting democracy. Google Ideas even used “kafkatrapping” by claiming that the responses to their tweet justified the panel, yet provided no evidence. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks wrote an essay saying that Google Ideas was an imperialist initiative in disguise.

My point is, looking at the picture, it seems that most of the participants were men. However, there is one woman I have heard of whose story has never been told in the media, but I have heard about her abuse for years. Her name is Christian Weston Chandler, and she is an autistic woman in this thirties in the state of Virginia who still lives with her parents. Ever since around 2007, she has been the target of much online abuse. She was discovered when an employer at a cards store that she frequented posted about her online, and people have been looking for personal information about her ever since. The Sonichu website is an entire website about her life. To be sure, she says and does a lot of inappropriate things, but a lot of the trolling that she faces is unjustified. She has been manipulated online by many people looking to bully her into submission.

Some examples include getting her to send her personal possessions, pretending to be love interests, and blackmailing her with stolen information. “Blanca Weiss” was a trio of trolls who tricked Chris-Chan into sending them a prized possession of hers, the “Sonichu Medallion” by pretending to be romantically interested in her. This medallion was created out of an anime character that she invented, called Sonichu. They uploaded a video of the medallion’s destruction to Youtube. Jack Thaddeus was the name of a troll that hacked Christian’s PSN information, and blackmailed her for it into humping her PS3 on live video. Needless to say, she did not return the information. Many other trolls, such as “BlueSpike”, who pretended to be a boy named Julie, pretended to fall in love with her online and used it to make a mockery of her through chat logs.

At her level of Autism, she has difficulty distinguishing between what is appropriate and inappropriate, so she has often been tricked into sending personal information to people that request it by email. One thing that she revealed was that she tried to attract men using a cardboard sign listing the characteristics that she was looking for in a man, and even sent a picture of the sign. She also revealed information about her childhood, her high school, and her years at community college. She has made many videos online, where she acts strangely and rants about random topics, and instead of finding help for her, they belittle her.

It is inappropriate to mock someone like her in this kind of mental state. Instead, she should be referred to appropriate mental health care. Yet it seems at this point, there is no advocacy group covering for her. Rather, many people online basically justify it by calling out inappropriate things she says and does. Unfortunately, the media focuses only on a small group of able-bodied masculists that exaggerate their victimhood, and ignores people in her living conditions.